Time's Echo (22 page)

‘Oh, don’t look like that,’ says Francis, tutting. ‘I’m not going to tell him, and you won’t either, will you?’

I can’t bear to be near him any longer. ‘I must see to the other guests,’ I say and turn away.

I can’t believe nobody has noticed that I am sick and shaking. The wainscot on the walls seems to be pressing in on me, and I only stop myself from fainting by concentrating very hard on
the warmth of the jug on my palm, the smoothness of the handle in my grip. Autumn sunshine is slanting through the glass and striping the hall with bars of light. They make the room look like a
prison.

My eyes rest on Ned. He is nodding, listening to Mr Fawkes, his head bent courteously towards the older man. I see him as if for the first time. My husband. He is not a very tall man, but he is
compactly muscled, and I find myself remembering how solid his shoulders feel beneath my hands in the dark. I no longer see the pockmarks on his cheeks. He is not handsome, no, but I like the quiet
angles of his face, and when I look at the line of his mouth I feel something warm uncoil inside me.

I wish I could go over to him and burrow my face in his chest. The longing to lean into him, just for a moment, to close my eyes and feel safe, is so strong that I am dizzy with it, but I know
Francis is watching me, his malign presence thickening the air. I know he would take it as a sign of weakness, of fear, and that would please him.

So I move on with the wine instead. I am a modest wife, and I am here to make sure Ned’s guests are well wined and well dined, and nothing else.

It is a relief to go to the kitchen and order Alison and Isobel to start setting out the table. I wish I could stay there, but I have to go back and take my seat at the table. If I have to sit
next to Francis, I will pretend I have been taken ill, I decide, but in the event he is beside Christopher Milner, who sits opposite me. This way it is worse, I realize. I can feel Francis’s
eyes on my face all through the meal.

The conversation turns to the new preacher in St Martin’s, who is by all accounts a godly man. Myself, I find his sermons very long, and my mind tends to wander to what I will cook the
next day, but I don’t admit that. Besides, no one is interested in my opinion. I am only a woman.

Francis is giving a fine impression of pious devotion. He attends divine service in the Minster every day, he says, and now that he is appointed churchwarden, he intends to tackle sinfulness in
the parish.

‘I take my office seriously,’ he says. ‘I will root out abominations wherever I find them.’

‘What abominations?’ asks Christopher Milner, his mouth full of mutton.

Francis looks grave. ‘There is witchcraft rife in the city, I hear,’ he says and the men at the table look uneasy. They are hard-headed men, for the most part. They go to church, but
their hearts are in their workshops and their warehouses. They don’t like talk of witchcraft and abominations. Women’s work, I can almost hear them thinking.

‘I fear the signs are all too real,’ Francis says, perhaps sensing their lack of encouragement. ‘Wherever you look there is disaster. Poor crops, sickness, lewdness and unrest.
Only last week they say a young woman in Selby gave birth to a cat.’

‘I heard there was a two-headed calf born up Haxby way,’ offers Charles Batchelor.

Francis’s eyes are alight with fervour as he leans across the table. ‘And who is to blame for all these monstrous abominations?’ he demands. ‘Persons of lewd and ungodly
life, blasphemers, and sorcerers!’

‘It is not the job of the wardmote to enquire into witchcraft,’ Ned puts in mildly from the other end of the table. ‘Our business is the everyday. We must worry about paving
and ditches and market offences, not sorcery and bewitchment.’

‘I worry about that cursed Anne Ampleforth,’ Christopher Milner grumbles, and there are some nods around the table. ‘What a scold that woman is! No one can live quietly beside
her.’

‘Indeed, but there is no suggestion that she is a witch, I think,’ says Ned, who has his own quiet authority.

‘Nothing that a spell in the thew wouldn’t sort.’ Christopher grunts his agreement. ‘And the sooner, the better, in my opinion.’

Francis, I can see, is growing impatient. ‘I know nothing of the Ampleforth woman, but there are others, I assure you. Two witches were arrested last week, and I trust will suffer the
punishment they deserve at the Assizes, but there are others still practising unhindered. The Widow Dent, for instance – why is she not taken in for questioning? Everyone knows she is a
witch.’

‘She is not a witch,’ I say clearly. I am the only one who knows how much he fears and hates Sybil. And why. ‘She is a cunning woman, who makes salves for cuts and bruises
– that’s all. You are new to the city. You do not know folk as we do.’

‘I make it my business to know about evil-doers.’ Francis’s response is smooth, unfazed by my tartness. ‘It is God’s work.’

‘Most so-called witches are but poor witless women,’ Ned says. ‘They are scapegoats for every misfortune and every grudge.’

‘You are too tolerant,’ says Francis thinly. He is unimpressed by Ned’s lack of fervour, that is clear. ‘It is not enough to be ardent in religion ourselves. We must seek
out those who have renounced Christ and entered into a bargain with the Devil, or we will none of us be safe.’

‘We should look to our own souls before we meddle in others’,’ Ned says and changes the subject.

Francis subsides then, and I realize that my husband, quiet as he is, has a presence that Francis can never match. I can see that the other men respect Ned, and it is not just for his wealth.
There is a steadiness about him, an unobtrusive strength, which means that he does not need to raise his voice or flaunt his prosperity for men to listen to what he has to say.

My husband is a good man. I haven’t realized this until now. I have been too taken up with my own feelings of strangeness and loneliness to think about his, but now I watch him and marvel
that I haven’t seen him properly before. I have never noticed the creases at the edges of his eyes, or the line of his jaw and throat. His linen is always very clean. So are his hands. I
have
noticed that.

I don’t realize that I am studying him until Ned looks down the table and our eyes meet. He doesn’t do anything as obvious as smile at me, but
something
happens. A
shortening of the air, a crisping of the senses. Something that leaves me feeling startled and hot. Flustered, I look away, and as I do, I catch Francis’s glance. His is dark with malice, but
suddenly I don’t care. Tonight I will lie with my husband, and my pulse jumps at the thought.

‘Alison.’ I beckon to the maid. ‘Bring Mr Bewley more wine. His cup is quite empty.’

I was holding the knife, and my eyes were stinging still from the onions that lay half-chopped on the board. My lips were curved in a smile, but it faded as I saw what was
sitting beside the onions.

An apple, brown and loathsome, and putrid with mould.

My pulse roared in my ears at the return to reality. Very carefully I set the knife down and groped my way to a chair in the dining room, where I dropped my head between my knees. The faintness
passed after a minute or so, but the fear remained, and I sat with the back of my hand pressed against my mouth, trying to summon up the courage to go back into the kitchen.

When I did, the apple was still there. I made myself touch it. It was real. And it hadn’t been there when I started chopping the onions – I was certain of it.

Hawise had put it there.

She was real.

This was not post-traumatic stress disorder. I faced it for the first time, hacking my way through every rational instinct that told me it was impossible. Hawise was a ghost, trapped somehow
between the past and the present, and she was using me. But what did she want? And why me? I thought wildly. What had I ever done to be possessed by a girl four centuries dead? And what was I
supposed to do about it?

Fear fluttered frantically in my throat, but I swallowed it down. I was
not
going to panic. I was not going to fall apart. I was not going to let Hawise use me any more.

I hadn’t tried hard enough to resist her, I could see that now. Part of me had been frightened, but I had been fascinated too. But now I felt as if I had stepped onto a train that was
going in quite the wrong direction; I was unable to open the doors or jump out, and there was no one to see me waving frantically for attention. No one to help me.

I
wasn’t
imagining things. That apple had been real; Hawise was real. There was no point in going back to Sarah or trying to persuade Drew about what was happening to me. I
didn’t know what Hawise wanted from me, but I was determined not to give it. I didn’t like not being the one in control. Somehow I was going to have to wrest control back from Hawise,
and I was going to have to do it by myself.

I put on rubber gloves and picked up the apple, gagging at the feel of it, saggy and squelchy, between my fingers. Opening the kitchen door, I threw the apple out, disgust propelling it in a
high arch out into the garden. And as it sailed through the air I saw the orchard, with its gnarled apple trees and unkempt grass – a snapshot – and then the apple plopped behind the
laurel bush and the picture was gone.

This was where it had happened, I realized. This was the neglected orchard where Francis Bewley had forced himself on Hawise. Was that why she was here now, and not in the fine house in Coney
Street?

I remembered that scrap of paper I’d found on the desk upstairs. Lucy had lived here. She had known about Hawise too.

And Lucy was dead.

My face was grim as I stripped off the gloves.

Oddly, I was less frightened now that I accepted the reality of what was happening than I had been before. My greatest fear had been that I was losing my mind, that I would be diagnosed insane
and shut up somewhere and pumped full of drugs. I would rather believe in ghosts than that.

By the time Drew arrived I had myself under control, but it wasn’t a successful evening. My fault. I was distracted. I tried to shut Hawise out of my mind, but I kept thinking about Ned
and how I had looked at him and suddenly
seen
him for the first time. Now I couldn’t take my eyes off Drew, couldn’t stop noticing how solid his body was, how firm the line of
his jaw, how competent his hands. Couldn’t stop wishing he would smile at me.

I didn’t like it. That was Hawise’s fault, I knew. If it wasn’t for Ned, I would never have
dreamt
of looking at Drew like that. It left me feeling edgy and uneasy and
unable to concentrate. The
opor ayam
was pretty good, but the conversation kept sticking uncomfortably. Drew didn’t seem bothered. He was better at silence than me.

‘Am I allowed to ask how you got on with Sarah?’ he asked. And by that point I was so grateful for a neutral topic of conversation that I told him about post-traumatic stress
disorder, which meant telling him something about the tsunami too, but it wasn’t so hard once I started. I told him about Matt. I told him about being swept out to sea. I told him I was
scared.

But I didn’t tell him about Lucas. I did think about it, but the words jammed in my throat. I would have had to vomit them out, and I couldn’t face Drew’s disgust. I wanted him
to think of me as calm and capable, rational – the way I
was
. I couldn’t talk calmly about Lucas. At one level I knew that Sarah was right. The longer I locked that away, the
more I feared it, but knowing that I should talk about it and actually letting the words out were two very different things. I wanted to, but I
couldn’t
. I was afraid of what Drew
would think of me, afraid of what I would have to face about myself.

I wanted to be normal, and for Drew to think of me as normal too. Was that so much to ask?

So I didn’t tell him about Lucas, and I didn’t tell him about Hawise, either. I would have to deal with her myself.

‘So, there you go,’ I finished lightly. ‘You’ll be glad to know that they’re not going to cart me off to the funny farm after all.’

I thought Drew would appreciate a rational explanation, but he frowned. ‘That doesn’t explain your bruises,’ he said. ‘Why would you hurt yourself?’

I got up to clear away the plates. There was no way I was going to tell him what I really believed. ‘It made sense, the way Sarah explained it,’ I said. I pinned on a smile.
‘Now, would you like some pudding?’

‘Hey, Sophie!’ I spotted her trudging off to school the following Tuesday and on an impulse trotted to catch her up.

She turned at the sound of her name. ‘Oh, hello,’ she said as I joined her, but not with any great enthusiasm, and I wondered if Drew could possibly be right about her admiring
me.

‘Where are you off to?’

She gave me a
duh
look. ‘School.’

‘Mind if I walk with you?’

‘It’s the wrong way for you, isn’t it?’

No, Drew was definitely mistaken, I decided, but I wasn’t going to let her put me off. I remembered what it was like to be a teenager, to be surly and graceless, to be terrified that
someone was going to pay attention to you and even more terrified that they weren’t.